


Finders Keepers

by deslea



Category: The Americans (TV 2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-13
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-06-08 02:41:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6835693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deslea/pseuds/deslea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her secret now belonged to Pastor Tim, and there was nothing she could do about it. It wasn't hers anymore. It was finders, keepers. Situated sometime after S04E08.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finders Keepers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jae Gecko (jaegecko)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaegecko/gifts).



She can't blame her parents.

Oh, she tried. Blaming parents is what teens do best, and she's no exception. And, honestly, a lot of it _is_ their fault. Her parents - her generation's parents - have done a brilliant job of fucking up the world, including but not limited to nukes and ripping holes in the ozone layer with a relentless onslaught of hairspray and deodorant. 

The latter is so ridiculous it makes her want to laugh and laugh. At least, it did. But Paige's yardstick for ridiculous now includes being the child of two people who, while in no way cool enough for it, are somehow the world's most improbable spies, and _ridiculous_ doesn't make her laugh the way it used to.

That took a while. She is, after all, a child of peacetime, and the notion of treason was mostly academic. In the beginning, she was mostly just angry that her parents had risked getting executed, angry that they seemed to think this was just another job, like being a doctor or lawyer, except it was one that could just happen to leave her and Henry orphaned. 

But after a while, that brand of anger had faded. After all, no one thought Mr Beeman was a bad father, and he could get killed from his job too. She supposed that in reality, most FBI agents did boring work and died of old age, just like everyone else. Maybe it was just like that. Maybe there were spies all over the place doing boring, ordinary, mostly-safe spying, too. If Mr Beeman's job wasn't like on TV, then maybe her parents' wasn't, either.

Not that any of them could afford to be completely complacent, of course. The Beemans weren't in the telephone directory, for instance, and she supposed her parents' insistence she shouldn't tell anyone was kind of like that. There _was_ a theoretical risk to all of them, and you had to be a bit smart about it. But…maybe that was as far as it went. The Beemans did tell people they were FBI, they just didn't blast it out on a megaphone.

She understands now the stupidity of that train of thought, but she had believed it for a while. It wasn't for lack of effort on her parents' part. They had been graphic about the consequences if they were caught. Not only would they go to prison at an absolute minimum, but Paige and Henry would probably be sent to Russia. They would be unceremoniously dropped off like a bag of laundry in the Soviet Union, where they knew no one, and not a word of the language. 

It was a prospect that had terrified her, and it was probably that terror more than anything that had made her bury her head in the sand, insist to herself that this was just like Mr Beeman being in the FBI, and nothing more than that. A secret big enough to need to tell it, but not so big that you needed to keep it for real.

So she had told, and she had learned the hard way. The secret you gave away could not be taken back. Her secret now belonged to Pastor Tim, and he could form his own opinion of it, have his own feelings about it, and even give it to Alice, and there was nothing she could do about any of it. Her secret wasn't hers anymore. It was finders, keepers.

It had taken a while for her to really understand what that meant. It meant that Pastor Tim and Alice were in her life now, not just while she wanted them there, but always. She couldn't blow them off, couldn't walk away. They were her problem, not just this week or this month, but _forever._ Finders keepers.

Slowly, leisurely, she has grown to hate them. They have become an albatross on her life and she longs to pick them off. She daydreams, sometimes, that her mother is the sort of TV spy who will just make them disappear, with blue liquid in a needle or a little pearl-handled pistol. Daydreams that her mom will be her hero, and make it go away, instead of making her deal with it, day after day after day.

She supposes that her mother really is a boring, ordinary spy after all.

She has _almost_ resigned herself to the fact that this is her life now when the news breaks that Pastor Tim and Alice are dead. A car accident while holidaying in Florida, no one's fault. Just bad luck. Good luck. Both.

She hates herself for it, but she is relieved, and she knows then that if her mother _had_ been a TV killer-spy, if she _had_ done it, she would have thanked her for it. She doesn't like what that says about her, but she's trying hard to be honest with herself even when she doesn't like it.

She hugs her mother tight that night, and thanks her for looking after her.

Just in case.

END

**Author's Note:**

> The notion of Paige being sent to Russia was inspired by Tim and Alex Foley's deportation (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/discovered-our-parents-were-russian-spies-tim-alex-foley). The US has different citizenship laws to Canada, where the Foleys were born, and it doesn't look to me like Paige would have actually been deported. However, I think it likely that her mother would have played on any fears she might have expressed, including about the validity of her citizenship or being sent to Russia, with a view to obtaining her silence.


End file.
